I have tried to search a solution and I don't want to pay if possible. The solutions I found so far are very complicated for me. Does anyone have a good method? My overall goal is to make it simple for my relatives to play on their computers / dvd players. I will burn it on a disc.

Oh, ok thanks, but what I want to do is to edit it, convert it to .wmv and put it on the internet. Do you know how I´d do that then? Any way to do it simply using windows movie maker or would I need a better video editing program?

3- Unzip, and drag your MTS files into the same folder. Double click _multi_demux_mts_Xvid.bat to process

4 - Once it is done, you'll find the Xvid AVIs in the same folder[/quote]

why would i unzip my MTS files?its not zipped in the first place.and what do you mean by dragging them into the same folder?what folder?i can only drag them into the mts_2_xvid.rar table thing and thats it. im really frustrated with this thing.been trying for days.and you said that i should double click multi_demux_mts_Xvid.bat, well i did but i didnt find any AVIs in the same folder.in fact, nothing changed even after i double clicked that multi demux thing.whats wrong?!

Thanks for the new (at least for me) solution Soopafresh! It's first result in Google in the moment (keywords "mts to avi"). This is much much faster than your other method I used till now. Is this one the best video quality/time consuming method in the moment? Because I have 80 GB of .MTS files and would like to make them smaller for the archives.

Thanks for the new (at least for me) solution Soopafresh! It's first result in Google in the moment (keywords "mts to avi").

The women have been flocking to me as a result of my newly found celebrity status
Is this one the best video quality/time consuming method in the moment?

Hard disk space is so cheap these days, you might want to consider just storing the original .MTS files on an external USB drive - the kind you can get from any electronics store. It all depends on how important the footage is. If it's family stuff, storing the originals on a hard drive will give you more options in the future as conversion technology gets better.

I like the output from the Vimeo script I put together. It makes 1280x720 h264 MP4 at 6000kbs. Not as fast as the Xvid script you've been using, but it might be worth the time. Try it out.

You'll probably want to choose the _multi_demux_mts_HQ_Vimeo_PAL.bat script. If your camera is shooting progressive, then the _multi_demux_mts_HQ_Vimeo_25p_Source.bat script would be better. I'm assuming your camera records at 25fps since you're in Europe.

Looks very good. Vimeo converts everything to 24fps, so fast movement can look a little jumpy. It might be interesting if sometime you'd try record at the 24p setting on your camera and see if the results look even better. 24p might not work well with sports footage, however. Who knows? Experiment!

Not to hijack this thread, but I've been having a related issue. I need a readily readable .avi-based format like Xvid for editing purposes, going from the original .MST file. I made some modifications to the Xvid .bat file I came up with this:

for %%a in ("*.dga") do @echo loadplugin("dgavcdecode.dll") > "%%~na.avs"
for %%a in ("*.dga") do @echo loadplugin("audiolimiter.dll") >> "%%~na.avs"
for %%a in ("*.dga") do @echo video=AVCSource("%%a",deblock=false) >> "%%~na.avs"
for %%a in ("*.dga") do @echo audio=wavsource("%%~na.wav").convertaudiotofloat() .normalize(0.95).wavgainlimiter(1.5) >> "%%~na.avs"
for %%a in ("*.dga") do @echo audiodub(video,audio) >> "%%~na.avs"

It works but the result is rather smudgy during any movement. The blacks are washed out as well.

I don't even need the compression, I have plenty of file space, I just need a clear picture with as little in the way of compression artifacts as possible. I'm not very familiar with the format of this scripting. I'm shooting at 1920 x 1080 and 24p at the moment. Any ideas? Thanks,

Err...how do I fix that? I'm not very familiar with this kind of scripting. Also, if this clears anything up, I'm not just getting a double image, some frames have three or four "ghosted" frames. I don't see any of the obvious interlaced lines like the left part of this picture, either. To me it looks more like messy compression artifacts. Thanks,

Here is the .MTS file. It's not a great demonstration of what I'm talking about but the ghosting effect is visible. On a strange side note, I noticed after capturing this that the footage looks similar when viewed in its original format on the camera. This seems to only be an issue when I shoot in 24P digital cinema mode, but I have interlacing problems after converting the video from MTS at the standard 30 fps. I say it "seems" to be because the LCD screen on an HDC-SD9 is pretty small so I'm not totally sure that there is no ghosting at the standard 30. But I've done projects going to Final Cut on a Mac (at 30, not 24P) before and not had this problem.

This stuff? That's a function of shooting in 24p and motion blur artifacts from AVCHD. You have to be really careful about fast moving things. Pans must be done slowly and carefully, count to at least 7 between the start and stop of the pan to reduce/avoid unwanted motion blur.

Yeah, that's the problem I was talking about. It's bad enough that the mouth of a person talking looks like sort of a blurry moving dark area. It doesn't seem as bad at 30P, however. (At least I'm assuming it is 30P, it really doesn't say on the camera and I don't have access to a manual for the camera.) Is there a way I could convert the .MTS to some kind of high-quality AVI and maintain the original framerate? Right now when I run that video through the script I get lots of blocky artifacts over anything that moves.

That particular problem is most likely due to the way libavcodec is decoding that particular camera brand's MTS file. PITA, isn't it? Looks like this (right window). (click on image a few times to see full size)

You can try this batch file instead, it uses directshowsource to decode the file.

Thanks for the suggestion. Just tried it, it still looks blocky, though.

I have access to a Mac with Final Cut, which imports the video fine, I just need a way to get from that to AVI files that I can use on my PC. I have a Mac formatted portable drive and a PC-formatted portable drive but given that a PC can't read a Mac formatted drive this doesn't help me much in transferring large quantities of video.

If your format that drive on your PC with Fat32, your Macintosh should be able to write to it, as long as the files you copy to it aren't larger than 4GB. You can also install an application on your PC called MacDrive, which will allow you to read and write to Mac formatted drives.

Yeah, the 4 GB issue was what kept me from wanting to that as I need to store some very large files on the drive. Thanks for the suggestion though. I might try to see if I can create a Fat 32 partition to one of the drives, that would allow me to work around this, I think.